Nineteenth-Century Havana: ‘All that is Solid Melts into Air’

Abstract

The eighteenth-century Anglo-French struggle for global mastery, the Haitian slave rebellion and the North American Revolution catapulted Cuba into the global economy. The capital of the world’s leading, fastest-growing sugar plantation economy experienced dramatic demographic and urban transformation. During Cuba’s prosperous nineteenth century, rapidly shifting economic, political and socio-economic relationships and antagonisms were inscribed in modern Havana’surban and architectural landscape.